Lynne Pledger, solid waste director for Clean Water Action, one of the many environmental groups against the state’s plan: “Of course if we didn’t put banned material in landfills, there would be more room. . . . The fact is these [new incineration] technologies are going to compete with recycling for paper, cardboard, and plastics.”

Massachusetts proposes loosening moratorium on incinerators

Plan to burn waste opposed; state disputed on safeguards for environment

By Beth Daley

Globe Staff / December 30, 2012

A state plan to loosen a nearly quarter-century moratorium on new waste incinerators is reigniting a long-simmering trash war in Massachusetts over how to deal with the vast amounts of garbage that residents and businesses generate each day.

State officials say landfill space is already so tight that Massachusetts is forced to export significant amounts of trash. By the end of the decade, space will be so scarce that the state could export as much as 18 percent of the garbage it generates.

To ease the landfill crunch, officials want to allow new technologies on a limited scale that would turn waste into energy and not emit as many harmful air pollutants as traditional incinerators.

Yet environmentalists are ardently opposed, arguing that the state could find more space for garbage if it stopped allowing banned materials such as recyclables, yard debris, and wood into landfills and incinerators. At the South Hadley Landfill in October, for example, there were at least 50 truckloads of banned material dumped in the landfill, according to town officials.

Environmentalists maintain that the new technologies are unproved and environmentally unsound and that loosening the incinerator moratorium will mean the state will not work harder to reduce waste.

“New technologies are proposed all the time, but thus far none of them have been proven safe and effective in removing harmful air pollution,’’ said Sue Reid, director of the Massachusetts office of
Conservation Law Foundation, a Boston-based legal environmental advocacy group.

State officials will probably decide whether to ease the moratorium within 30 to 60 days after receiving public comment through Feb. 15 as part of finalizing a solid-waste master plan for the state. Taunton officials are already hoping to bring such a facility to their community.

Garbage woes are nothing new in Massachusetts, which boasts some of the country’s most ambitious efforts to reduce garbage. The state, for instance, will begin banning some commercial food waste from landfills and the seven existing incinerators in 2014. But Massachusetts has experienced problems achieving those reduction goals.

The state lifted a moratorium on landfills in 2000 because of a growing realization that more space was needed for garbage, but no new landfills have been built because of a lack of space and opposition from local communities. The state has periodically reviewed its 1990 incinerator moratorium, most recently in 2009, when officials decided to keep the moratorium in part because new technologies to burn garbage in an environmentally safe way remained unproved.

Now, state officials say the situation is dire. In 2010, Massachusetts landfills had space left for about 2 million tons of garbage. By 2020, landfills will have room remaining for less than 600,000 tons. Without increased recycling, waste reduction, composting, or more space in Massachusetts landfills, garbage exports are projected to rise to 2 million tons a year by 2020.

“Even if we hit these extremely aggressive recycling targets, we would have still have a capacity problem,” said Kenneth Kimmell, commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection. He said emerging technologies could help the state get rid of garbage that cannot be recycled.

Instead of traditional incineration that emits copious pollutants into the air, technologies called gasification or pyrolysis convert garbage into liquid fuels or gas that is clean and renewable and with less air pollution, he said. No such commercial technology operates in the United States, environmentalists say, which is why they are skeptical.

Kimmell said loosening the rules would allow a trial of the technology and only consume up to 350,000 tons of garbage a year out of 10 million to 11 million tons Massachusetts residents and businesses generate each year. Recyclables or banned material would not be allowed, and the facilities would have to adhere to strict air-quality rules.

Although Kimmell acknowledged a problem with enforcement of banned and recyclable material being dumped in landfills, he said the issue was unrelated to needing more ways to get rid of garbage.

Still, he pledged to expand a pilot program to require third-party independent “spotters” paid for by the state’s 230 transfer stations, landfills, and incinerators to document trucks that dump significant amounts of banned material. State environmental officials will follow up with enforcement, he said.

UK austerity policies a cautionary tale

By Megan Woolhouse

Globe Staff / December 29, 2012

SALISBURY, England — Trussell Trust was founded here more than a decade ago to help starving children in Bulgaria, but in recent years the nonprofit has expanded its mission dramatically in a once-unthinkable direction, opening more than 200 food banks across the United Kingdom.

This year alone, the centers have distributed free groceries to about 130,000 British families, more than double the number in 2011.

“The fact that people need food in 21st-century Britain is certainly shocking,” said Molly Hodson, a spokeswoman for the trust, as she sorted canned beans at the Trussell Trust clearinghouse recently.

“This is a time of crisis in the UK.”

As US political leaders debate tax increases and spending cuts to close the nation’s budget deficit, England is implementing deep cuts in government spending as part of a multiyear plan to halt a widening budget gap and and preserve the country’s AAA credit rating. But two years of austerity have backfired as a struggling economy slipped back into recession and a plan that was supposed to bring deficits under control within five years will take ­longer than predicted.

In many ways, it is a cautionary tale for political leaders in Washington who face a Jan. 1 deadline to reach a budget compromise before a series of automatic spending cuts and tax increases take effect. About $500 billion in US government spending cuts will take effect unless President Obama and Congress reach an agreement.

Some economists, noting England’s malaise, said such measures would defy generally accepted economic views that cutting spending at a time of economic weakness only hurts the economy more.

“An austerity drive now would raise our already painfully high unemployment rate and might trigger another recession,” said economist Peter ­Diamond, a Nobel laureate and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If the cuts are big enough, it can derail the economy and set it back, which is what we are seeing in Britain.”

Britain’s Parliament, led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, enacted steep spending reductions when his coalition government took ­office in 2010. Most departments were required to slash at least 25 percent from their budgets, shaving $180 billion from the nation’s $1.4 trillion debt.

The government estimated 66,000 public jobs would be lost in the first two years of austerity, but so far about 372,000 have been eliminated, according to Lombard Street ­Research, a London forecasting firm.

The Cameron government also imposed a wage freeze for all but the lowest tiers of government workers, tougher requirements to qualify for public housing and disability payments, and massive cuts to the welfare system.

At the same time, the sales tax on most goods and services was raised to 20 percent from 17.5 percent and capital gains taxes on investments increased to 28 percent. Corporate taxes were reduced to 24 percent from 28 percent over five years to encourage business growth and hiring.

Cameron said the measures were necessary for a nation facing its largest-ever peacetime debt, a financial abyss that grew deeper after a massive taxpayer bailout of the nation’s banking industry in 2008 and 2009.

The government and its supporters concede that these steps are painful in the short term, but argue they will maintain the confidence of financial markets, attract business and investment, and lead to prosperity, much as the austerity policies of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s revived a moribund British economy.

Earlier this month, George Osborne, chancellor of the ­exchequer, the government’s top financial official, announced that austerity measures would need to be extended into 2018 because of a slower recovery than forecast, which he blamed on the broader economic slowdown in Europe. But Osborne asserted that the bitter economic medicine was beginning to show results, as evidenced by the flow of investment into British government bonds, a sign of increasing confidence in the UK economy.

“It’s a hard road, but we are getting there,” Osborne told the House of Commons. “Britain is on the right track — and turning back now would be a disaster.”

The British economy had ­appeared to be recovering from its own housing bust and financial crisis, but spending cuts ­enacted in 2010 began to take a toll by the end of that year, and Britain slipped into a double-dip recession.

David Koch is competing with Wayne LaPierre for being the craziest Scrooge this holiday season. Koch's crusade is denying Sandy victims any emergency relief. Any relief. All relief.

Billionaire David Koch’s prime political organization, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), having failed in its$125 million quest to oust President Barack Obama, is now aiming at a slightly less sophisticated political target: victims of Hurricane Sandy. [...]Earlier this week, AFP, which is chaired by Koch and believed to be financed by several other plutocrats from the New York City region, released a letter warning members of Congress not to vote for the proposed federal aid package for victims of the storm that swept New Jersey, New York City and much of the surrounding area in October. An announcement on the group’s website says that the vote next week for the Sandy aid package will be a “key vote”—meaning senators who support sending money for reconstruction could face an avalanche of attack ads in their next election. Already, opposition to the bill is growing, although it passed one procedural hurdle last [Friday] night. [...]
Koch’s top deputy in New Jersey, a surly gentleman named Steve Lonegan, who heads the local AFP state chapter, called the aid package a “disgrace.” “This is not a federal government responsibility,” Lonegan told reporters. “We need to suck it up and be responsible for taking care of ourselves.”

Hear that, Staten Island, Coney Island and the Rockaways? Get out there and replace your own power poles and restring your own wires. Repave your own streets and rent your own backhoes to clear away your demolished neighborhoods. Suck it up. Easy for one of the world's richest men to say.

Medea Benjamin of Code Pink is removed by a security guard during a speech by Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association during a news conference in Washington. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

While the final funerals for the victims of the Newtown, Connecticut school massacre have been held, gun violence continues apace, most notably with the Christmas Eve murder of two volunteer firefighters in rural Webster, New York, at the hands of an ex-convict who was armed, as was the Newtown shooter Adam Lanza, with a Bushmaster .223 caliber AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. James Holmes, the alleged perpetrator of the massacre last July in Aurora, Colorado, stands accused of using, among other weapons, a Smith & Wesson AR-15 with a 100-round drum in place of a standard magazine clip.

On Christmas Eve, the same day as the attack in Webster, the UN general assembly voted to move ahead with 10 days of negotiations on the arms trade treaty, to commence 18 March. Recall it was last July that the Obama administration said it "needed more time" to review the proposed treaty, effectively killing any hope of getting a treaty passed and sent back to member nations for ratification. This was just one week after the Aurora massacre, and in the heat of a close presidential election campaign.

The global treaty shouldn't be controversial. By signing on, governments agree not to export weapons to countries that are under an arms embargo, or to export weapons that would facilitate "the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes" or other violations of international humanitarian law. Exports of arms are banned if they will facilitate "gender-based violence or violence against children" or be used for "transnational organized crime".

The treaty deals with international exports of weapons and ammunition, not any nation's internal, domestic laws that govern the sale or use of guns.

"Every day, 1,500 people die in armed conflicts around the world – one person every minute. These unregulated weapons are used to force tens of thousands of children into armed conflict and to rape women and girls in conflict zones. More than 26 million people around the globe are forced from their homes, and their livelihoods destroyed, by armed conflict.
"The NRA must immediately stand down on its campaign to block a global arms trade treaty."

The first banner, held by Tighe Barry, read "NRA Killing Our Kids". Barry held the banner in front of the podium, silently, as LaPierre tried to continue his speech. Barry was then pulled out. After LaPierre resumed his speech, Medea Benjamin rose, holding a banner reading, "NRA: Blood on your hands", after which she was hauled away.

Two days later, on NBC's Meet the Press, LaPierre denied that regulating semiautomatic weapons or high-capacity magazines would help stem the epidemic of mass shootings in this country.

"I have not seen anywhere else in the world a gun lobby that has the same level of influence on its own government as the NRA does in the United States …
"The US buys and sells almost as much weaponry as the rest of the world combined. So what happens in the U.S. is going to have enormous impact on the rest of the world."

From the hallways of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, to Afghanistan, to Somalia, the flood of US weapons and ammunition fuels violence, death and injury. President Obama and Congress need to take action, now.

Slate partners with @GunDeaths for an interactive, crowdsourced tally of the toll firearms have taken since Dec. 14.

Since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, we at Slate have been wondering how many people are dying from guns in America every day.

That information is surprisingly hard to come by. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, for example, has a tally atop its website of “people shot in America.” That number, though, is an estimate, based on the number of gun injuries and deaths recorded by the CDC in 2008 and 2009, the most recent years for which statistics are available. It seems shocking that when guns are in the headlines every day, there’s no one attempting to create a real-time chronicle of the deaths attributable to guns in the United States.

Well, someone is. Since this summer, the anonymous creator of the Twitter feed @GunDeaths has been doing his best to compile those statistics, tweeting every reported death he can find. He was inspired, he told us in a phone interview, by the Aurora, Colo., shootings and simply wanted to call daily attention to the toll that guns take. Now Slate is partnering with @GunDeaths to create this interactive feature, “Gun Deaths in America Since Newtown.”

[Sad graphics available on the link below.]

Each victim under 13 years of age is designated "child"; from 13 to 17: "teen"; 18 and older: "adult."

Of course, this data is incomplete. Not all reports get caught by @GunDeaths’ news alerts or his followers. Suicides, which are estimated to make up as much as 60 percent of gun deaths, typically go unreported. Nevertheless, we at Slate want to assemble this data as best we can.

And the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. If you know about a gun death in your community that isn’t represented here, please tweet @GunDeaths with a citation, and he’ll add it to his feed. (If you’re not on Twitter, you can email slatedata@gmail.com.) His data feeds our interactive feature.

The Passport photo of 46-year-old Sunando Sen, pushed to his death because a woman thought he was Muslim (Photo: Christie M. Farriella for New York Daily News)

A woman who told police she shoved a man to his death off a subway platform into the path of a train because she hates Muslims and thought he was one was charged Saturday with murder as a hate crime, prosecutors said.
.....
"I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I've been beating them up," Menendez told police, according to the district attorney's office.
......
Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Friday urged residents to keep Sen's death in perspective as he touted new historic lows in the city's annual homicide and shooting totals.
"It's a very tragic case, but what we want to focus on today is the overall safety in New York," Bloomberg told reporters following a police academy graduation.

What kind of perspective is Bloomberg referencing? If someone said "I shoved a Jew in front of a train because I hate Jews," would Bloomberg be touting drops in the city's annual homicide and shooting totals? Quite an insensitive comment, at the very least.

After this news broke, Twitter was aflutter with people pointing to Pamela Geller as one culprit pushing anti-Muslim sentiment in the city. Geller's organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, recently put up a new crop of ads that features the World Trade Center burning with a Qu'ran verse printed to the right of the towers.

Geller's role in promoting anti-Muslim sentiment of the sort that leads to Islamophobic hate crimes should not be in dispute. But what should also be highlighted is how New York City's own police force has promoted anti-Muslim bigotry time and time again, from surveillance of Muslims that places the whole community under suspicion to training officers with an Islamophobic flick.
Friend of Mondoweiss Lizzy Ratner made this point in her excellent piece on Geller in The Nation:

Though Geller and her crew are fringe elements, they are not random or spontaneous, idiopathic lesions on the healthier whole. They are, quite sadly, part of this country, outcroppings of something big and ugly that has been seeping and creeping through the body politic for years. In the decade since September 11, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry has become an entrenched feature of our political and social landscape. It lurks in the hidden corners of everyday life—in classrooms and offices and housing complexes—as well as in the ugly scenes that occasionally explode into public consciousness. In the special registration of Middle Eastern men after 9/11. In the vicious campaign against Debbie Almontaser, the American Muslim school teacher who tried to open the Arabic-language Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) and was tarred as an extremist. In the attack on the Park51 Islamic center, more commonly (if less accurately) known as the Ground Zero mosque. In the New York Police Department’s selective surveillance of Muslim communities. And that’s just New York City. All of these instances should have called on our horror and outrage, and in all too many of them, society hasn’t lived up.

This crime appears to be the latest manifestation of New York City's Islamophobia. This time, it cost a life.

It Is Easier Than You Think

It’s easier than you think. That’s the way I start discussions and interviews about my new book titled, “Seventeen Solutions.”

The “solutions” were selected for their long-overdue practicality, fairness, efficiency, safety, employment potential and respect for future generations. A majority of the people, sometimes a large majority, support such redirections. The effects of many of the “solutions” start being seen immediately.

Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy

Police used teargas to drive back protesters following an attempt by the Occupy supporters to shut down the city of Oakland. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council.

And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.

The documents, released after long delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations' knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61).

"FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) … reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat … The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country."

"This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI's surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

The documents show stunning range: in Denver, Colorado, that branch of the FBI and a "Bank Fraud Working Group" met in November 2011 – during the Occupy protests – to surveil the group. The Federal Reserve of Richmond, Virginia had its own private security surveilling Occupy Tampa and Tampa Veterans for Peace and passing privately-collected information on activists back to the Richmond FBI, which, in turn, categorized OWS activities under its "domestic terrorism" unit. The Anchorage, Alaska "terrorism task force" was watching Occupy Anchorage. The Jackson, Michigan "joint terrorism task force" was issuing a "counterterrorism preparedness alert" about the ill-organized grandmas and college sophomores in Occupy there. Also in Jackson, Michigan, the FBI and the "Bank Security Group" – multiple private banks – met to discuss the reaction to "National Bad Bank Sit-in Day" (the response was violent, as you may recall). The Virginia FBI sent that state's Occupy members' details to the Virginia terrorism fusion center. The Memphis FBI tracked OWS under its "joint terrorism task force" aegis, too. And so on, for over 100 pages.

Jason Leopold, at Truthout.org, who has sought similar documents for more than a year, reported that the FBI falsely asserted in response to his own FOIA requests that no documents related to its infiltration of Occupy Wall Street existed at all. But the release may be strategic: if you are an Occupy activist and see how your information is being sent to terrorism task forces and fusion centers, not to mention the "longterm plans" of some redacted group to shoot you, this document is quite the deterrent.

There is a new twist: the merger of the private sector, DHS and the FBI means that any of us can become WikiLeaks, a point that Julian Assange was trying to make in explaining the argument behind his recent book. The fusion of the tracking of money and the suppression of dissent means that a huge area of vulnerability in civil society – people's income streams and financial records – is now firmly in the hands of the banks, which are, in turn, now in the business of tracking your dissent.

Remember that only 10% of the money donated to WikiLeaks can be processed – because of financial sector and DHS-sponsored targeting of PayPal data. With this merger, that crushing of one's personal or business financial freedom can happen to any of us. How messy, criminalizing and prosecuting dissent. How simple, by contrast, just to label an entity a "terrorist organization" and choke off, disrupt or indict its sources of financing.

Why the huge push for counterterrorism "fusion centers", the DHS militarizing of police departments, and so on? It was never really about "the terrorists". It was not even about civil unrest. It was always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by citizens – it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you.

One of the false arguments used to support Predatory Gambling is the revenue flowing across state borders, ignoring all other revenues flowing for other reasons, such as airport development. In Massachusetts, many are flocking across the border because Boston-centric politicians have allowed Logan to become an inaccessible disaster. Lebanon is offering a great deal that will provide a foundation for their economic development.

Helps a small regional airport to get a million dollar grantBut the $12 flights to Boston and New York are not from Cape Cod, but from small regional, Lebanon Airport in New Hampshire where Cape Air is the only airline service available.

Click above image to see the Cape Air offerlarger.The efforts and price chop is aimed at helping the NH airport qualify for a million dollar grant.

The promotion is in time for a little post-Christmas shopping in two big cities. Cape Air and the airport in New Hampshire are promoting flights to Boston and New York for $12.

It's an attempt to qualify for federal grant money by flying out at least 10,000 passengers this year, the airport and Cape Air is helping by offering holiday travelers the last-minute steal of a deal - $12 each way.Yahoo News reports that the Cape Air promotion was introduced on Christmas Eve, and it is an attempt to reach 10,o00 enplanements - the number of passengers boarding an airplane.

Once the airport hits the 10,000 mark, the FAA will give $1 million in grant money to help fund projects for the community airport.

A lawyer
with the non-profit Center for Auto Safety in Washington said the technical
service bulletin discusses electronics issues -- not mechanical issues raised in
the massive recall -- and how the condition was corrected, CNN reported
Tuesday.

"If you look at this document, it says electronics," attorney Clarence Ditlow said. "It
says the fix is reprogrammed in the computer. It doesn't say anything about
floor mats."

....repair bulletin proves the
manufacturer misled the public about the causes of sudden
acceleration.

Friday, December 28, 2012

The claim is that 4 years ago, Spengler stole a gun from a 20 year old woman??? Additional details will surely emerge. Sorry, folks! I can't wait for the NRA's campaign that reminds us 'Guns don't kill people.....'

NY woman arrested in connection with slaying of 2 [firefighters]

WEBSTER, N.Y. (AP) — A 24-year-old woman was arrested Friday and charged in connection with the Christmas Eve ambush slaying of two volunteer firefighters responding to a house fire in upstate New York.

Dawn Nguyen of Rochester faces a state charge of filing a falsified business record, State Police Senior Investigator James Sewell said. Nguyen also faces a federal charge; a news conference with the U.S. attorney in western New York was scheduled for 4 p.m. Friday.

Sewell said the state charge is connected to the purchase of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun that William Spengler had with him Monday when firefighters Michael Chiapperini and Tomasz Kaczowka were gunned down. Three other people were wounded before the 62-year-old Spengler killed himself. He also had a .38-caliber revolver, but Nguyen is not connected to that gun, Sewell said.

The .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle, which had a combat-style flash suppressor, is similar to the one used by the gunman who massacred 20 children and six women in a Newtown, Conn., elementary school earlier this month.

Nguyen and her mother, Dawn Welsher, lived next door to Spengler in 2008. On Wednesday and again on Friday, shortly before her arrest, she answered her cellphone and told The Associated Press that she didn't want to talk about Spengler. Her brother, Steven Nguyen, told the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper of Rochester that Spengler stole the guns from Dawn Nguyen.

Like most, we believed the Toyota propaganda about having corrected their SUA [Sudden Unintended Acceleration] problem, unsecured rugs, driver error, blah, blah blah. Until we purchased a Toyota with NO BRAKES!

We chose to park the defective Toyota of the property of Route 44 Toyota rather than risk killing your child or family member.

Please note the comments. There are the usual shills that pretend attorneys are getting rich, drivers are making up these issues, yet there are some informed, insightful comments.

amclaussen

Mexico

Part 1 of 2As a Scientist and engineer, I'm surprised about the
spin that this subject has taken, or more properly, that has been given to, in
order to favor or protect someone interests. There is at least one high
quality,rigorous and properly formatted study of the known (for decades)
phenomena of Tin Whisker growth in circuits. This study concludes that there is
a possibility of 140/1,000,000 of these whiskers to produce a failure, which is
significant given the quantity of vehicles.The study is titled: Tin whisker
analysis of Toyota’s electronic throttle controls by Bhanu Sood, Michael
Osterman and Michael Pecht,Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering,
University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA.Why the government
agencies have concluded this failure mechanism was not the root of the
uncommanded acelerations is simply not clear to me. the study shows very clear
microphotographs of the tin whiskers, and its redaction and methodology is
impeccable. I've heard comments on two different groups of scientists of NASA
giving their opinions on this subject, but I haven't read them yet. Regardless,
this NYT article don't even mention this possibility with the appropriate
importance and significance it has.

amclaussenMexico

Please read my comment below on the Tin-Whisker Problem. It is feasible
that the company is making a large move directing attention to floor mats,
dumb-driving and other supossed causes, while ignoring real possibilities that
would pose a serious economic risk for the manufacturer. And there is the also
the possibility of bugs (software-errors) caused the accidents. There is a
concept called "The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code"...
The NASA study of the Toyota Electronic Throttle Control firmware found at least
243 violations of these rules! (according to WikipediaSo... before ruling
out electronic failures (both hardware and sofware related) government officials
should work more professionally to find the thruth. Amclaussen.

Arnold GordonRockville

Toyota's (and its dealers) pattern of misconduct and indifference
continues to date. I have a 2006 Camry and it has a steering column problem
which in a Technical Service Bulletin (#ST001-06) of 2-16-2006, one month after
my purchase, described the problem but told it's dealers: "This repair is
covered under the comprehensive warranty...warranty application is limited to
correction...upon a costomer's specific complaint". Therefore if you didn't
detect the problem they weren't going to fix it. At 90000 miles plus my service
station told me I had the problem (looseness in the steering mechanism) and
found the TSB after considerable computer research. After complaining to 355
Toyota in Rockville, MD they told me they would be glad to fix it at my expense.
I asked them how they could morally and ethically justify the fact that they had
received the bulletin one month after selling the car to me and not advising me.
They hung up. I will never buy a Toyota again...ever! Anybody who does is a
fool!

amclaussenMexico

Mr. Gordon:Your point is valid, but if had another make of car, you
would be saying exactly the same, just to that make. The industry produces a lot
of defective designs, most of them minor go unnoticed; from time to time, a big
one attracts the attention of the media. Remember the Ford-Firestone case:
people lost lives and these companies battled each other for years, ending a
previous relation. You correctly saythe information is not as quick to find.
Sometime it is not freely available, but can be found talking to shops that see
these errors daily. Manufacturers have their own "Code of Un-ethics", more or
less the same across all them: first; deny any knowledge that a problem exists,
make the owner believe his problem is not common, make him responible for it
(was its fault for not following a maintenance program at the dealer-expensive).
If the defect IS real, reduce the image that it is widespread. Try to charge the
repair, making it appear as an "out of warranty". If all fails, make a deal
& pretend it never happened. I'm a DIY person that enjoys auto repair as a
hobby, I've above average knowledge of autos and a number of tools. I've heard
many complaints from friends and people about design failures, material
failures, factory goofes etc. I've seen MANY from ALL makes of cars. They are
showing weaknesses and their ways to save money, they all fail, ones more than
others, but all of them. Owners need to find the problem, and put the blame
where it belongs.

In conducting their analysis of Toyota’s engine control systems, CALCE researchers Bhanu Sood, Michael Osterman, and Michael Pecht did agree with NASA scientists who found that “tin whiskers” were present in the accelerator pedal units of every potentiometer they examined. But whereas NASA relied on an analysis of warranty data provided by Toyota’s defense expert Exponent to conclude that the tin whiskers did not present a safety hazard, the CALCE scientists found them to be “a cause for concern.”

Tin whiskers are crystalline structures, many times thinner than a human hair, that often form on the tin solder and emanate on the surface of printed circuit boards, causing shorts / current leakage paths and electronic malfunction.

While the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration exonerated Toyota’s electronics after the NASA report, CALCE researchers found as many as six tin whiskers on one potentiometer type accelerator pedal position sensors (APPSs), and concluded “the potential for a tin whisker shorting failure was 140/1 million. Considering the number of vehicles on the road, it is expected that this would present a significant safety hazard.”

Moreover, the CALCE researchers also found that tin whiskers could form in the Engine Control Modules (ECM) of Toyota vehicles, because Toyota used tin-lead solder and tin plating where devices were connected to the circuit, which operates various automotive components much like a computer.

“In this case, Toyota has tin plating in a rather sensitive area, where the system relies on changes in resistance to provide a signal for acceleration.”

The findings contradict the report NHTSA released in February concerning the electronic throttle control systems in Toyota, in which Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood asserted, “There is no electronic-based cause for unintended, high-speed acceleration in Toyotas.”

According to the CALCE scientists, “It is highly likely that tin whiskers could induce a failure that is later undetected. For this reason, best practices for electronics design stipulate that tin not be used as a plating material.”

Based on their findings, the CALCE panel found NHTSA’s conclusions irresponsible. “It is very questionable why the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with a stated mission to ‘save lives, prevent injuries and reduce economic costs due to road traffic crashes, through education, research, safety standards, and enforcement activity,’ has not come out with a requirement that no electronics use pure tin as a material component, since the potential for tin whiskers presents an unreasonable and unnecessary risk.”